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Raised in Fear: PHANTASM and the Uses of Enchantment

Raised in Fear: Phantasm and the Uses of Enchantment

For many filmgoers, seeing their first horror movie is a rite of passage: mine came at the tender age of six, on our first family visit to the drive-in to see The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973). Though I imagine I must have been scared, what I remember most from the experience was getting out of the car when we returned home, and looking up at the moon, which now held a newly ominous sense of enchantment. Contrary to the prohibitive logic of our ratings classification system, horror films, like fairy tales and märchen in an earlier era, can and do provide young minds with a visual vocabulary for structuring imaginative experience.

Don Coscarelli’s low-budget auteur classic Phantasm (1979) explores the dynamic relationship between fact and fantasy in its dream-like variation on the coming-of-age narrative. As the somewhat equivocal conclusion of the film suggests, the entire story would seem to be the extended dream, or “phantasm,” of its thirteen-year-old protagonist, Michael (A. Michael Baldwin). The film’s bold melding of science fiction, fantasy, and horror narratives is a testament to the vibrant spirit of unfettered independent film-making, but it is also a vivid portrayal of the ways in which our teenage minds were structured by a rich and eclectic variety of media and stories.

When Michael visits a blind old fortune-teller and her starry-eyed granddaughter for advice on how to cope with the increasing absence of his beloved older brother, Jody, for example, the old crone subjects him to a fear-test copped directly from Frank Herbert’s Dune. This is the first of several hints that the gothic horror mode in which the film begins will point towards other genres. The intermingling of horror and science fiction (not to mention 1970s interior decorating) is nicely encapsulated in the set of Michael’s bedroom, where we see him covered in an orange and brown afghan, slumbering beneath a wall-size poster of NASA’s famous “Earthrise” image. The camera cuts to another image of Michael’s bed, now in a graveyard, as the earth around him suddenly erupts and he is covered by a host of corpses who seem to draw him beneath the earth. These are the things alienated kids obsess over, and hence it makes sense that these would shape the dream life of the main character.

But the interweaving of narrative conventions in the film is not merely playful: as the film slowly unveils its science fiction underpinnings, it begins to explore fears and anxieties that haunt the borders between genres and the ways those genres reflect our imaginative perception of the world. In one of the most sensitive readings of the film, John Kenneth Muir describes the nuanced ways in which the film uses horror conventions to structure the story of a teenage boy’s coming to terms with death and loss. Most intriguingly, Muir addresses the film’s concern, not merely with the passing of loved ones, but also with the “death industry” which profits from such loss. This industry is hauntingly embodied by the glowing white edifice of Morningside Funeral Parlor, first shown in a striking wide-angle shot where it stands ominously in the background, framed between Jody (Bill Thornbury) and his band-mate Reggie (Reggie Bannister), as they discuss the recent loss of their friend and third band member, Tommy (Bill Cone). From that point forward, Morningside will cast a long shadow over the lives of the characters, repelling and alluring them in equal measure.

While loss and mourning are certainly keynotes of this often surprisingly poignant film, the science fiction story which lies at the heart of the mystery that is Morningside Funeral Parlor will direct our attention, and our fears, towards what is perhaps an even more traumatic part of growing up: getting a job. Imagined through the dreaming mind of our protagonist, this fate takes the form of an outlandish conspiracy theory: the Funeral Director, referred to only as the Tall Man (Angus Scrimm), turns out to be an emissary from another world, sent to retrieve reanimated corpses who will serve as slave labor on a distant planetary wasteland.

What cannot help sounding ridiculous when summarized in a few words takes on a horrifying vividness in the film, largely through the working details of this zombie slave industry. Michael, Jody, and Reggie eventually meet in a glowing white room filled with three-foot canisters complete with ventilation holes revealing the dwarf workers trapped within. These transport cases uniformly line the walls in a grotesque image of efficiency. In the center of the room stands a two-pronged gateway into the destination world, which Michael briefly passes through, to hover over an eerie red desert on which a long line of forced laborers march towards a distant horizon. After being rescued from the portal, Michael describes his vision to his brother and friend, and works through the infernal logic of what’s been going on up at Morningside: “Slaves. They're usin' 'em for slaves. The dwarfs. And they got to crush 'em 'cause of the gravity. And the heat. And this is the door to their planet.” Where once the protagonists feared death at the hands of the ominous Tall Man, they are now faced with an even more horrifying life-in-death that resembles a grotesque dream version of that forced labor politely termed a “career,” looming just over the dwindling horizon of youth.

In contrast to this envisioned slavery is the characters’ earlier life, which seems to consist largely of tradin’ tasty guitar licks on the front porch, tinkering with Jody’s muscle car, drinking Dos Equis, slinging ice cream, getting laid in the graveyard, spying on an older brother getting laid in the graveyard, and pursuing paranormal mysteries on a mini-bike. The film, like many low-budget horror films of the period, seems to take place in a land where it is always late summer, the streets are strangely deserted, and the parents strangely absent. The disturbing mystery that eventually engrosses our youthful heroes emerges through Michael’s binoculars as he witnesses the Tall Man lifting a casket with his bare hands and loading it into the back of his hearse. In one of the film’s delightfully dumb but idiomatically pitch-perfect conversations, Jody responds: “You’re crazy. I helped carry that sucker myself. It must have weighed over five hundred pounds. Well, I can’t figure this thing out. But I do know one thing: something weird is going on up there.” Later, when Reggie boastfully proposes a plan to “lay that sucker out flat and drive a stake right through his goddamn heart,” Michael replies in the film’s rich period vernacular, “You gotta be shittin’ me man: that mother’s strong.” And indeed he is.

As Michael, Jody and Reggie begin to pursue “that Tall Dude” in earnest, the story assumes a Boy’s Own Story-like charm, while deftly retaining the sense of uncanny menace established so effectively in the film’s opening scenes. Accompanied by a marvelously supple score in which the haunting theme song shifts through ominous, groovy, and somber variations, the unlikely story pursues its digressive path towards an equivocal conclusion that leaves the reader to determine the relative truth-value of the story’s many layers. Ambiguity and circularity of plot come to serve as this wildly inventive film’s most effective means of warding off the deadening sense of closure looming over the horizon. Perhaps Phantasm has become such an enduring cult film, at least in part, because its outlandish narrative strategies offer such a compelling way of re-scripting our own life stories.

Jed Mayer is an Assistant Professor of English at the State University of New York, New Paltz.

EYE OPENERS: The Trailer for the La Di Da Film Festival

The trailer above, created by Tom Shek of National Television, is zippy and jammed with images, mainly the faces and presences of independent film figures. How many can you identify? The event it advertises is the La Di Da Film Festival, which will have its debut in New York on September 14-16: the festival has an eye on small, independent, handmade, spontaneous, and, most of all, original films. A production of the 92YTribeca and Bomb Magazine, among other sponsors, the festival is curated by critic Miriam Bale, who has published pieces in Film Comment, GQ.com, The L Magazine, and elsewhere.

The event will feature work and performances by Joshua and Ben Safdie, Maiko Endo, Sam Fleischner, Alex Karpovsky (of HBO's recent Girls), and others. The films the festival includes will be varied in their approach, from animation (Josephine Decker's Me the Terrible, about a child pirate's attack on New York) to found footage (Dustin Guy Defa's Family Nightmare, about life in dysfunctional families).

Click here for more information, or click here to buy tickets!

Grains of Sand: The Meditative Beauty of SAMSARA

Ronald Fricke's Samsara is a trance movie. Its title is a Buddhist term that roughly translates as, "The cycle of death and rebirth to which life in the material world is bound." And in a roundabout way, the movie does tell that story. Fricke's 1992 feature Baraka tells that story, too—the biggest, simplest story; the only story, really. But for my money, Samsara is better than Baraka—and better than Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisquatsi, which Fricke shot—because its images are more purely contemplative and much more free. They aren't being bent and juxtaposed to advance certain arguments, however loosely.

There are points where the film steers you in a certain direction—for instance, rhyming shots of factory-farm butchery and shots of newly-minted rifle bullets pouring into a bin at an ammo factory (industrialized violence), or the placement of uncannily realistic robots, rubber sex dolls and meat-market strippers in the same montage (dehumanization). But for the most part it's a very loose, confident movie, one that seems to have been made by a much wiser, more relaxed director than the one who created Baraka. Fricke used a birth-to-death structure in Baraka, too, but it was more mathematically precise there. The earlier film was linear, for the most part. It confined its tangents to subchapters that might as well have been captioned: "The same industrial power that brought us modern cities also brought us genocide." "Different cultures observe different rituals, but deep down all rituals are the same." "The rich don't give a damn about the poor." In Samsara, Fricke and his editors work with similar images (though more vivid and crisp because they're shot on 70mm film). But this movie deploys them differently—in a looser, more confident, more open-ended way. You have to get into the spirit of the movie, engage with it, relax, and float downstream.

I wish there were more movies like it. I wish Tree of Life were a bit more like it, actually; I adored Tree of Life, but it wasn't until I saw Samsara that I realized why I was never quite able to embrace it as a Malick masterpiece. The problem wasn't that Tree of Life went too far into abstraction for my taste, but that it didn't go quite far enough. By anchoring ephemerally lovely images to a simple story and innocent/questing/banal voice-overs, Malick got as far away from mainstream narrative cinema cliches as he could without cutting the cord. Fricke cuts the cord. The result covers some of the same thematic ground as Tree of Life, and offers some similar images, but it's a much more direct, simple, free-spirited movie. It's experimental cinema pitched at mainstream audiences. As such, it has few equals.

The director/cinematographer and his editors juxtapose images of wealth and poverty, nature and civilization, war zones and dead bodies, guns and ammunition, old people and young people, people of different cultures and faiths, and shots of babies, village elder-types, packed commuter trains and oppressive offices and charnel-house factory farms, scudding clouds, plumes of volcanic steam, rivers of lava, image after image in section after section. But rather than string the images along a linear-philosophical clothesline stretched from cradle to grave, Samsara shuffles and reshuffles images like cards in a deck. The movie visits and then returns to images of individuals, crowds of people, animals and vehicles whirling in circles, and dancers posed so that the lead dancer in the foreground seems to have multiple arms, like a Hindu goddess. Every person, every country, every climate, every body of water, every type of terrain is connected: we sense this connectedness from the rhythms of the film, not because individual cuts are telling you, "See? This thing here is kinda like this thing over here."

There's no missing the disgust Fricke brings to shots of poultry being skinned and gutted, or the shots of shantytown residents digging through dumps while gleaming condominiums and office buildings loom behind them. And yet Samsara is not a didactic movie. It has a showman's sensibility. The probing closeups and geometrically lovely wide shots are presented as little movies in themselves, self-contained spectacles with their own internal logic and personality. Each shot is an object of contemplation, a springboard for emotion and reflection, but at the same time, the sheer handsomeness of the production says, "If you want to just sit back and enjoy this as a travelogue or a borderline-psychedelic sound-and-light show, that's fine, too." Samsara is the work of a guru, not an acolyte. Fricke is a master leading the audience through meditation, giving us suggestions for dreaming. Our mind takes us where it takes us.

Matt Zoller Seitz is the co-founder of Press Play.

The True Horror of THE WALKING DEAD Comics

The Walking Dead Issue # 100 SPOILERS ahead. That is your only warning, but that really isn't what this is about, at all.

Which is worse: delusion or acknowledgment?

I have frequently had a very contentious relationship with The Walking Dead comic (written by Robert Kirkman). Four years ago, when Kirkman elected to kill off a large portion of the regular cast, including an infant girl, I went on a tirade that lasted for weeks. I was angry at Kirkman for his "betrayal" of the fans, and their affection or attachment to long-standing characters. Later though, I realized that my extreme emotional reaction to the comic was a rare thing, and that it was preferable to ambivalence. At least TWD is provocative. My take on the book went from "I’m never reading this again" to "top of the pile, read it immediately." But the most recent issue, # 100, is very distressing.

The events of this book make me seriously, seriously re-evaluate the relationship of the writer with his fan base. My honest opinion is that Robert Kirkman is a sadist. But hand in hand with that notion is something more dreadful: the fans are masochists. To keep returning to a series that has consistently "provoked you" with the exact same punishments is masochism. Because it is clear that Kirkman's entire philosophy with this book is to be as mean and awful to essentially good characters as he can. His entire shtick is to bait the audience with a simple little worm that I felt certain would not be on the hook in the anticipated issue # 100: "Someone is going to die." I felt certain that, because the entire series has been about suffering, punishment and death, he would actually find a clever way of making # 100 memorable without resorting to killing off a major character. Unfortunately, that is exactly what he did. In graphic, undignified, intimate detail, over the course of several pages, he displays the bludgeoning death of Glenn, a young man about to become a father. He has his skull bashed in and his eye popped out, in front of his friends and wife, who stand impotently by. That eye. That fucking eye! That eye in so many frames, like a punchline: ha ha, you fans, you were stupid enough to care about this character, now look.

This feeling of betrayal was at the root of the moral grappling I did years ago with the death of Rick’s wife Lori and their infant daughter. I had to take a good long look at what I wanted from the comic. At the time, TWD was not terribly original. It still isn’t. What it was was satisfying to fans of the “zombie/survival” horror genre, featuring regular people tasked with simply surviving a world overrun with gruesome reanimated ghouls. Mountains of graphic carnage provided the eye candy, as in all the Romero films. TWD was comfort food for horror fans. But the dynamic began to shift. By simple nature of its longevity and ongoing nature (as opposed to the finite storytelling of a feature film), the characters could not help but become more developed, more familiar to the audience. The attachment grew stronger, the stories more personally involving, so that the fans created an attachment to, and reliance upon, the characters to tell “their stories” in the same way that soap operas create passionate devotion in their audience. Concurrentwith this, though, was the tension created by Kirkman’s controlling hand, a struggle for dominance over ownership; a palpable desire to assert his authority over the book was more and more evident. Again, this was stimulating for me as a fan; I was not used to being provoked in this way, in a world traditionally marked by the impermanence of death. In comics, nobody ever dies forever. Well, except in TWD. Just 2 issues before Lori met her end, a supporting character name Tyreese was unexpectedly executed by decapitation in front of his friends. It was shocking, nauseating, and unambiguously FINAL. This man was dead. Ingloriously. Used as a pawn by another to demonstrate power. So: Tyreese, Lori, an infant, and a host of other supporting characters, wiped away from the page. As noted, I was, in retrospect, in shock.

I denied the shock. I asserted I was in control of my feelings. I stressed that Robert Kirkman did not have this power over me. (But I was also ashamed to know that he did.) I swore off TWD over issues of betrayal of fans (not me, other fans—this was altruism). But over time, I came back. The curiosity was irresistible. But also, I wanted that extremity of emotion. The demonstrated ability to shock, to extract feeling from the passive reader, was something I had not previously truly experienced in comics. To be clear, the single most common motivating factor of dropping a book (to stop reading a comic) is boredom. A disengagement with the proceedings or characters. TWD was many things but it was not boring. I elected (surrendered) to keep reading. But now there was another, more palpable emotion at play: dread.

Frequently I have read of fans' strategy of "not getting attached to anyone" in TWD, because Kirkman has routinely illustrated, through attrition, that "no one is safe." This would seem to run counter to the strategies used by other comics to retain readers, comics that actively encourage strong vicarious identification with their heroes and their super deeds. Always in peril, your average super hero is virtually guaranteed to overcome any adversity. But even a major hero like Superman or Batman faces death; but the economy of fandom and the profit margin of the publisher always collude to resurrect the dead hero. Death is temporary in the world of comics. It’s really nothing to worry about. Any longtime comics fan can tell you this. It is an accepted truth.

Except in the world of TWD. In the world of this comic, anyone can die at any moment, but especially if that moment happens to be a hyped landmark anniversary issue. This is so cynical it makes me nauseous. This sadistic display, which the author can disingenuously claim is “natural” to the book, was calculated to occur in front of a large audience. Basically guaranteed to make a mountain of money. I find this unsettling, mercenary, and again, a sadistic display of power. An assertion of ownership and control over the characters and their fates.

Of perhaps even greater moral terror (thank you Colonel Kurtz) is the way it makes me ponder my reaction to this spectacle. I seriously have to contemplate why an audience (including myself) would return to this world again and again, when Kirkman, the cynical bastard, has very clearly and repeatedly stated that this book is about hopelessness and imminent death, and that any joy will be revealed to the audience solely to make the ensuing horror that much less tolerable. Only pages before Glenn has his eyeball knocked out of his skull, he says with gratitude how he can see a bright future for himself. That he feels hope. But it is clear that this is solely a cheap device to manipulate the weak-minded reader into feeling a high, so that the ensuing low will be that much deeper. It’s the cheapest manipulation out there. It’s the same as when, in a WWII movie, a guy shows his buddy a picture of his girlfriend back home. That guy will be killed in the next scene. He might as well put on a red shirt and be in Star Trek.

The worst thing about Glenn's death is that it is punishment for anyone who has been weak enough to allow themselves to care about the narrative of TWD. Kirkman has strung another 50-odd issues since the last massacre in what feels like a hypnotist's trick in order to pick your pocket. But who is to blame, really? Is it Kirkman, preying upon the weak wills of comics fans, who he gambles will compulsively, addictively continue buying TWD no matter how miserable a world it is, or how much he degrades the characters? Or is the fan to blame, for voting with his dollar that he wants to be shat upon, to have his nose rubbed in filth and decay, and he is willing to pay for it? Because Kirkman has made it clear: that's what this book is about. The fans KNOW. *I* know. This book is about how the world sucks. It is about how no matter how hard you work, you will be punished a hundred times more. It is about how everything will fall to ruin. About how love is useless. How life is pointless, effort futile. How your mind will falter, you will belonely, your body will slowly be taken from you piece by piece, and even your humanity will be stripped away simply by continuing to live. You will eventually do awful things and be numb. And then you will die in an undignified manner, inspiring others to shut down, or just feel pain. Even if you survive longer than others, you will be scarred, disfigured, and mutilated. Just look at twice-shot Andrea, and one-handed Rick. The monocular Carl, who lost his conscience as well as half his vision. Even poor old Dale was reduced to limping around on a toilet plunger after he had his infected leg lopped off. And then he died, too. Pain and humiliation weren’t enough for old Dale.

For a fan to continue with this book, from this series of events and themes, that fan must actively take pleasure in hopelessness. Yet I think I am less concerned with how the author has again assaulted us with this recent event, than what it has inspired me to examine in myself. Why do I want to see this story, when it is clear and obvious it is just about some sick pervert exercising power over weak, compulsive masochists? There isn't going to be any happiness in this book. There isn't even any cleverness to be had with it. It’s a one-trick show: "someone will die." If a landmark issue is approaching that promises "a big event,"it’s obvious what that event will be. Someone dying. There's just no other trick left in the bag. Other comics have pursued a similar strategy, telegraphing the imminent demise of the hero often months in advance, to generate sales. “Superman is going to die in # 75!” “What issue are we on now?” “# 70.” “What happens in between now and then?” “We see the fight that happens first. For five issues. (And their crossovers).” But of course it is just a gimmick. An accepted ruse the fans participate in. It’s a don’t-ask-don’t-tell maneuver just waiting for the inevitable reversal, the return to status quo.

TWD's sole original note is that it has embraced the long-form narrative of the Supermen and the Spidermen and turned it into an endurance test for not only the characters but the audience. It’s such a relentlessly negative, vile parade that it causes me, again, moral terror. Is life so shitty that miserable comics fans will prefer being emotionally assaulted over feeling nothing at all? Is it better to feel violated than jaded? How dreadful is that? But seriously, is that what is happening with TWD? Are we, as readers, participating in some sick sex game with Robert Kirkman? Because I really think I will probably keep reading TWD. That's the awful and revelatory part. I definitely feel manipulated by Kirkman. I feel cheap, and I feel desperate in a way. I feel like I did when I watched 9/11 videos and cried but was happy that my life didn't suck as bad as that. I don't know if he is happy in his life. I don't know if I'd be happy if my fans said, "I only come back because I am weak and addicted. I know this won't make me happy and in fact will make me sick. Here is my money, that you can use to justify your continued storytelling as approval and desire for more." But what I think is revealed through this relationship is a sickness. I'm not proud of it. And it is very complex. Because I must find a balance between not caring about characters or their fates, and continuing to read about them. That just seems like subservient compulsion. It also feels like self-punishment. Are we taking pleasure in the violence routinely inflicted on the zombies, and in need of criticism for that pleasure? When the only payoff is anger, despair, disgust, and shame, why does a reader want more? What sort of pleasure is that? Doesn't that make the reader a disgusting, complicit participant?

The jury’s still out as far as the TV show is concerned. We may be headed there, we may not. While the two narratives share characteristics, they are already markedly divergent. True, we lost Dale, but every zombie story suffers casualties. There is an opportunity with the show to retain some small element of hope, which the comic, with Glenn’s death, has forever abandoned. Already I sense a deepened, passionate attachment to the characters of the show. A friend recently commented, “if they did that to Daryl, I’d stop watching.” I wonder. I wonder how long it will take the TV audience to accumulate the same degree of commitment to Their Stories as the comic fans have. I wonder about the economy of TV versus the printed page, if real world forces (advertisers) will in any way constrict the show’s ability to mimic the scorched earth approach to characters that the comic has. How alike are these two audiences? How willing is a popular show’s audience to regularly tune into an hour of humiliation, despair and hopeless suffering? Because that is the road the comic has gone down. Maybe I am late to this party, but there isn’t any return after # 100.

I think The Walking Dead comic degrades the human condition. It twists our desires for entertainment and conflates them with guilt. The saddest thing is that it is obvious that I and others like it. It reveals me as a sicko. It reveals a weakness, and an insecurity, an inability to divorce myself from something that is bad for me. The Walking Dead is brutalizing rape porn. It's an abusive husband. It's a pusher of powder-cut junk. The best thing to do would be to just stop. But then there would be nothing. That is the terror. Again, Kurtz: "The horror." In the world of The Walking Dead, both on the page and off, you must make friends with horror, and moral terror. There just isn't anything else.

Lee Sparks is a critic based in Austin, Texas.

EYE OPENERS: STILL DOTS: THE THIRD MAN, Frame by Frame

So, I love projects like this: since last December, at the film/video blog for Minneapolis's Walker Arts Center, Matt Levine and Jeremy Meckler have been analyzing isolated frames of Carol Reed's The Third Man (1949) in a series called Still Dots. They run two pieces a week, switching off responsibility for posts, and they plan to keep doing so until this December. They choose frames 62 seconds apart, using the image itself, with all of its ramifications, as a basis for observations. On Friday the 68th post went up, and Levine manages to make references to Freud, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Masahiro Mori's "uncanny valley" theory (referring to the discomfort slightly-less-than-human robots cause in humans), Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, and Dostoevsky within a relatively short space.

What's remarkable about projects like Still Dots, or Nicholas Rombes's similar Blue Velvet Project at Filmmaker Magazine (which inspired Levine and Meckler), is the amount of variety, texture, and inclusiveness possible when the focus of a piece of writing, or any other work, is reduced by somewhat arbitrary constraints. There are several cliches which might apply here: only in specifics can one achieve universals, necessity is the mother of invention, limitation from the outside can lead to greater expansiveness within… But the result, which is the important thing in this case, is golden, and we'll be reading it until the end of 2012.

Plus: The Third Man! What's not to like?

The Unbearable Sadness of THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN

The Amazing Spider-Man is shockingly terrible, a glorified cartoon with black skies and a black heart. Everyone dies, or is sad about someone dying, or will surely die in the sadly inevitable sequel.

And when an action movie is so grim, and so dark, and so bathed in grays and blacks and the shiny metallic skyline of New York City, it's almost impossible to enjoy the film, due to the fact the characters are miserable, graphically injured, or close in appearance to a big green version of Voldemort. Here is a super-hero movie that is neither noble or enjoyable.

This is a summer blockbuster in which the action scenes are gratuitous and useless, and it’s amazing (ha) any of these characters were able to stay on their Prozac long enough to take any sort of action. This is Kafka’s Spider-Man.

Peter Parker is sad for the entire movie! What follows is a spoiler-laden summary of the film from Peter Parker’s perspective.

First he’s sad his parents left.
Then he’s sad everyone picks on him.
Then he’s sad he’s bad with girls.
Then he’s sad he was bitten by a spider.
Then he’s sad about his parents again.
Then he’s sad about the fact he created the lizard.
Then he’s sad Captain Stacy won’t listen to him.
Then he’s sad because Captain Stacy dies.
Then he’s sad because he’s not allowed to see Gwen Stacy anymore.

Then, a useless final shot of Spider-Man pointlessly hanging upside down, keeping watch over a city he has now made more dangerous than ever; Having learned nothing from an ordeal that culminated with Peter Parker alone and miserable and beaten to a pulp, along with the crippling emotional weight of knowing he inadvertently caused the death of his Uncle Ben along with Captain Stacy, his ex-girlfriend’s dead father. The movie is all one terrible downward spiral, and this is supposed to be a summer tent pole summer action blockbuster movie, based on Marvel Comics’ signature hero? At this rate, they could have kept Tobey Maguire in the movie and made it about his mid-life crisis.

This is a Spider-Man movie that is so meekly trying to emulate the style of The Dark Knight, it hurts. The Dark Knight took a grimly dark atmosphere and infused it with three-dimensional characters, excellent writing, a flair for tension and gritty realism, and wrapped it in the grim themes of sacrifice for the greater good and the unrelenting fight against crime. The Amazing Spider-Man is a deadly serious and graphically violent affair almost completely about death and sadness, involving 24-year-old high-school sophomores.

Uncle Ben is graphically shot and murdered, and bleeds profusely; Captain Stacy is painfully impaled, presumably suffering tremendous pain as he waits for Spider-Man to come back and listen to his over-long death monologue. Even the lab rats are cannibalistic killers in this flick. Going beyond just violence, there are about half a dozen disturbing scenes involving biting, swollen faces from fights, and a bunch of lizard-related ickiness. How is it that The Amazing Spider-Man is more visually gory than the Dark Knight films?

Now I know what you’re saying: Spider-Man, in the Tobey Maguire version, has some grim stuff in it too. Willem Dafoe impales himself; Uncle Ben dies again; Spider-Man has to wrestle Macho Man’s ghost, and worse, kiss Kirsten Dunst. There’s also the scene where Oscorp is pumpkin bombed during a parade and some skeletons are shown. But that was deliberately cartoonish in nature, a rollicking good adventure, a little bit scary on purpose. The Amazing Spider-man is shocking and grotesque, filled with graphic violence and intentionally disturbing images. There’s a difference between a movie like Mars Attacks and a movie like Independence Day, and even Independence Day didn’t have a scene of a graphically bleeding chest wound with a high-school-aged boy futilely attempting to put pressure on it, covering his hands in blood.

Then, to make things worse, this movie dares to feature the obligatory post-9/11 “Americans Are Heroes Trademark Moment,” including a cliched low angle shot of a blue-collar American saying something like “he’s one of us” while the camera holds on an American flag in the background just a half second while the music swells. This, of course, is opposite the general mood of the rest of the movie, which is horrid doom. If this is your idea of an American hero, there’s something wrong with your movie, or something wrong with America.

I know Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man and The Amazing Spider-Man have been compared with each other a billion times, but at least the earlier Spider-Man had a style to it, and despite some flaws, the cinematography at times made you feel as if you were sweeping through New York City. The Amazing Spider-Man is largely shot from afar, moving into and out of the frame, like a multi-million dollar version of a PC animator from 15 years ago.

As well, the fights in the first two Spider-Man films were, at the least, emotionally motivated. Spider-Man, Maguire edition, fought with all he had in the first Spider-Man. After Norman Osborn kidnapped Mary Jane and attacked Aunt May, he was angry. The emotion and tension between the two characters came to a head in a brutal hand-to-hand battle during which an entire wall came down on one of the characters. And while The Green Goblin’s outfit looks too much like a shiny Power Rangers zord, the emotion and tension of this scene carry it. The Amazing Spider-Man, on the other hand, features a sophisticated and drawn out fight scene between characters using the best in computer generated imagery, but is almost entirely devoid of emotion..

Batman and Robin is probably The Amazing Spider-Man’s closest cousin, in its color coding and cartoonish masquerade as an attempt at gothic themes. Batman and Robin was bathed in neon and cliches. The reality of the world was unimportant beside the terrible puns and flimsy action scenes. Actually, Batman and Robin gets points for not taking itself very seriously. The Amazing Spider-Man doesn’t get the same points.

I guess I’m confused and angry, infused with a bit of curmudgeonliness. This is an appropriate take for the Spider-man Mythos? Where everyone is dark and pitiful? Aren’t heroes meant to be looked up to? How many grade-school recess conversations have been focused almost solely about which super-hero you most wish you could be?

Do people want to be this Spider-Man? Depressed and miserable at all times? God, I hope not.

Paul Meekin is a Chicago based writer, television producer, and movie critic for Streetwise Magazine. He can found on Twitter at @MeekinOnMovies and Facebook at www.facebook.com/MeekinOnMovies. He also stars and writes the hit web-based sketch comedy show, "FatMan and Little Girl" on YouTube Channel: ANTVGM64.

Ten Bollywood Memories I’ll Take With Me To My Grave

If you’re like most Americans, your first exposure to Bollywood cinema was almost assuredly via the opening scene of Terry Zwigoff’s Ghost World. Though your recall of this early 21^st century indie flick now consists of little more than a murky haze of kvetching Buscemi and eyeball-rolling Johansson, I’ll bet you five bucks ($5 U.S.) that there is one thing on which your memory is crystal clear: the scene of Enid (Thora Birch) smoking and cavorting around in an oversized reddish-orange graduation robe while watching some of the most crazy-ass, head-shaky dancing every captured on celluloid, courtesy of her bedroom TV. Male or female, straight, L, G, B, or T, you’ve harbored a massive, gut-sinking crush on Enid ever since. Yes?

No.

I have no doubt that you thought you had the hots for Enid. But if we can be honest with each other for a second here? It was never really the raven-haired chunky glasses–wearing social outcast you were lusting after; it was the extremely groovy blindfolded slick-haired and bee-hived line dancers, the John Waters moustache–wielding singer hiccupping “Jaan Pehechan Ho” into the old-timey chrome microphone, the rollickin’ baritone gee-tahr licks, the black-and-white checkerboard dance floor—the whole gestalt. You, my sick friend, have been harboring a massive, decade-long woody for Hindi popular cinema.

Not that I can blame you. I’ve had a boner for Bollywood since the early 90s, when friends dragged me along to see Khuda Gawah, a nearly three-and-a-half hour epic starring Amitabh Bachchan and Sri Devi as star-crossed lovers from warring Afghan tribes, the first five minutes of which slapped my face so hard my jaw has remained partially agape ever since. In the years that followed, I somehow managed to see somewhere between 500 to 1,000 of these all-singing, all-dancing hyper-melodramas from the Subcontinent. Not that every one of them was a, uh, jewel in the crown, or whatever. But let’s just say that, when I finally retire, supine, exhausted, into the pillowy luxury of my final death bed, I’ll be comforted with an array of lurid, supersaturated cinematic memories to help ease the fear and pain.

Here are 10 scenes that will definitely be among them.

1. Filmi: Jal Bin Macchli, Nritya Bin Bijili (1971)
Sangeet: “Jal Bin Macchli”

Legendary director V. Shantaram got his start in the late 1920s as a serious innovator, pioneering the use of the trolly shot and telephoto lens in what was otherwise a relatively static, live theater–informed field. Praised early in his career for a series of well-shot socially conscious melodramas, Shantaram’s world—and that of Bollywood itself—dramatically somersaulted with the introduction of affordable color film in the 1950s. From that point on, like an eight-year-old exhorting his parents to watch him tumble across the grass, Shantaram pandered shamelessly to his audience. This scene, from one of the last films in the great director’s oeuvre, features Sandhya, Shantaram’s real-life wife, performing an avant-garde interpretation of a fish out of water (or “jal bin macchli” in Hindi) that, while not as overblown and spectacular as dance scenes later in the film (Sandhya does a whole number on crutches after her evil rival breaks her leg), is utterly mind-blowing, despite its relative restraint.

2. Filmi: Disco Dancer (1982)
Sangeet: “I Am a Disco Dancer”

Babbar Subhash’s melodrama of hyper-ambitious rival dancers may have been half a decade late to the international disco party, but Disco Dancer has gone on to become a bona fide Bollywood b-movie classic. This scene is so jam-packed with eye-popping bits—a line of guys wielding guitars like machine-guns, a purple-clad girl knock-knock-knockin’ on a bald guy’s head, superstar Mithun Chakraborty’s space-age silver suit and WTF wing-tipped headband—it’s impossible for the human brain to process them all in one viewing.

3. Filmi: Awaara (1951)
Sangeet: “Tere Bina Aag Yeh Chandni” and “Ghar Aaya Mera Pardesi”

Raj “The Showman” Kapoor is one of Hindi cinema’s best-loved directors, and this scene—a dream sequence that took several months to shoot—is probably his most famous. Featuring superlush music from superduo Shankar-Jaikishan (surely their finest hour) and an ethereal Nargis (with whom Kapoor was understandably smitten), it offers sublime beauty and surreal kitsch in equal measure. The tumbling statues toward the end of the scene are nothing short of breathtaking.

4. Filmi: Amar Akbar Anthony (1977)
Sangeet: “My Name Is Anthony Gonsalves”

“You see, the whole country of the system is juxtaposition by the haemoglobin in the atmosphere because you are a sophisticated rhetorician intoxicated by the exuberance of your own verbosity!” Where do you go after a line like that? Well, if you are Bollywood’s biggest (and literally tallest) star, Amitabh Bachchan, it will most likely involve wearing a top hat and coat while doing a back-flip out of a giant Easter egg. Known for his hilarious, twisty plots, Monmohan Desai outdid himself in this fast-paced comedy of errors about three brothers who, separated at birth, go on to follow the three major religions of India (Hinduism, Amar; Islam, Akbar; Catholicism, Anthony).

5. Filmi: Mr. India (1987)
Sangeet: “Hawa Hawaii”

Speaking of inspired nonsense, you’ll note the lack of English subtitles during the first minute-and-a-half of this deliriously un-PC scene featuring Sridevi and her blackface-sporting entourage. That’s because the former Tamil child star turned 1980s Bollywood sweetheart is belting out streams of pure, delicious Zaum. Nothing in the annals of WTF Japan has anything on this number. Oh, and in case you’re wondering, the film—Shekhar Kapur’s breakout hit, and the most successful Indian film of the 80s—is about an evil plot by the island-dwelling villain Mogambo to destroy India that is thwarted by a bracelet that renders its wearer invisible.

6. Filmi: Inteqaam (1969)
Sangeet: “Aa Jane Jaan”

And speaking of blackface and WTF moments—and Bollywood has, alas, hands down the most of any regional cinema—here’s the ubiquitous uber-vamp Helen at her absolutely most salacious as she pulls out all the stops to tease and inflame her caged, “kazoomiya!”-belting victim—“savage desires” metaphor, anyone? Yes, I feel guilty and unclean every time I watch it. Which, perhaps not uncoincidentally, is about as often as I do my laundry.

7. Filmi: Caravan (1971)
Sangeet: “Piya Tu Ab To Aaja”

More on Helen: Born in Burma just before the Japanese invasion, the half-Burmese, half-Anglo-Indian child escaped the country now known as Myanmar on her mother’s back in the 1940s, growing up in Bombay, where she would go on to become Hindi cinema’s single most ubiquitous character actor slash dancer. Being an immigrant of mixed ethnicity, Helen got the vampy bit-part roles few if any native actresses of her stature would touch, playing everything from Chinese and Japanese to American and British characters. In Caravan, she played a Spanish woman named Monica, who, drunk and panting, exhorts her equally panting, bullfighter boyfriend. In a moment of raw, hot-blooded, unslaked desire, she also dry-humps the underside of a children’s playground slide.

8. Filmi: Kath Putli (1957)
Sangeet: “Hai Tu Hi Gaya Mohe Bhool”

Kamala Laxman, a.k.a. Kumari Kamala, is one of the most celebrated Indian dancers of all time. While her best filmed performances were in Tamil and Telugu films (search her name on YouTube), she did make a few stunning appearances in Hindi film, most notably this insanely exuberant six minutes’ worth of south Indian dance–inspired leaps, pirouettes, hand-gestures and facial expressions rarely seen in Bollywood. And, OMG! Those eyebrows!

9. Filmi: Janwar (1965)
Sangeet: “Dekho Ab To”

How did I get this far without reppin’ my main man, Shammi Kapoor? Here we have the single most insane dance scene of his entire career. While a quartet of mop-top guitarists in full early Beatles regalia belt out a Hindi bastardization of “I Wanna Hold Your Hand,” the Shamster spazzes out like Elvis Presley simultaneously channeling Jerry Lewis and Jerry Lee Lewis. Words cannot describe how ferociously good watching this makes me feel.

10. Filmi: Mughal-e-Azam (1960)
Sangeet: “Pyar Kiya To Darna Kya"

Color came late to Bollywood; this epic, which was filmed over the course of a decade, was shot mostly in black and white, though two reels, including this scene, were shot in color. And what color! If the hyper-saturated glowing jewels everywhere don’t dazzle you, check your pulse. Or focus in on Madhubala, who gave the performance of her brief but brilliant career in this film, where she played Anarkali, the court dancer who scandalously steals the Emperor Akbar’s son Salim’s heart. I love especially how, some five-and-a-half minutes into this scene, Akbar’s eyes grow redder and redder in anger as he watches images of Anarkali multiply to near-infinity in the palace mirrors until, unable to take it anymore, he throws out his arms, putting a halt to the shameless nautch girl’s performance.

Gary Sullivan’s poetry and comics have been widely published and anthologized, in everything from Poetry Magazine and The Wall Street Journal to The Norton Anthology of Postmodern Poetry (2^nd Edition, forthcoming). Everyone Has a Mouth, a selection of his translations of poetry by the Austrian schizophrenic Ernst Herbeck, was recently published by Ugly Duckling Presse. He lives in Astoria, Queens, where he maintains bodegapop.com, a music blog devoted to treasures found in immigrant-run bodegas in New York City.

SIMON SAYS: WILLIAM FRIEDKIN ON VIOLENCE, HUMOR, AND IDENTITY

"Human nature is violent," William Friedkin tells me, going on to say that he also likes Immanuel Kant's phrase "the crooked timber of humanity." As an artist, Friedkin is as blunt, matter-of-fact, and masterfully cynical as his initial statement suggests. His films indicate that a character's environment is, more often than not, what he reacts to when he snaps. Superior dramas like The French Connection (1971), To Live and Die in LA (1985), Cruising (1980), and Sorcerer (1977) are all about myopic obsessives, characters who are desperate to the point where they can't see how their actions have led them to become fatalistically self-involved. That same tendency towards self-harm is what makes many of Friedkin's movies bleakly and corrosively funny. For example, the hanky code scene in Cruising, where Al Pacino's undercover cop is comically baffled by the semiotics of the hanky code, is humorous because we're being encouraged to laugh as a man denies his own latent attraction to the subcultures he's investigating.

So in that sense, it's not surprising that Killer Joe (2011), which Friedkin describes as his "darkest film yet," is a comedy. In it, Matthew McConaughey plays a corrupt, schizoid cop hired by desperate white trash to kill one of their own kin in order to collect a $50,000 life insurance policy. "Yes, it's a black comedy, in the way that Dr. Strangelove is a black comedy, nonetheless disturbing because of its subject matter," Friedkin told me Wednesday. He went on to tell me that with Killer Joe, he wanted to make a dark comedy that was direct and brutally "unsentimental." You can see that lack of sentimentality in the way that Friedkin uses Clarence Carter's "Strokin,'" a song that is about exactly what it sounds like what it's about, twice in Killer Joe. "I love 'Strokin'!' I think it's very funny and courageous. It's sort of a character on its own. It's kind of a statement on the all of the bullshit that surrounds today's films, kind of a reaction to that. It's not sentimental and the movie is not sentimental. It's funny, and if you really listen to it, it's a little dark."

It actually makes sense that "Strokin'" is used during a scene in which a major character gets beaten to a pulp, a nasty choice but not excessive to the point of being gratuitous. For a filmmaker who has, over the years, continually pushed the envelope in his portrayal of violence on film, especially in films like The Exorcist (1973) and Cruising, that's saying a lot. "I thought I went as far as I needed to and no more or no less," Friedkin remarked. He went on to say that he and his crew were surprised that the film got an NC-17 rating, in spite of its handful of scenes of full frontal nudity and over-the-top violence. Despite his surprise, Friedkin does not contest the rating: "None of us thought we'd get an NC-17, but when we did, I think we realized it's the correct rating. Because I'm not targeting teenagers. Once I got that rating, I knew I could hack that movie to pieces to get an R, but I didn't want to do that. I just didn't want to do that. So once they gave us an NC-17, the distribution company appealed it and they lost the appeal. So we left it alone."

Violence and sex are often the source of dark humor in Friedkin's films, a debt traceable to Friedkin's affinity for Henri-Georges Clouzot's films. Many of Clouzot's movies, like The Murderer Lives at Number 21 (1942) and Le Corbeau (1943) have a vicious sense of humor and are character-based. In fact, Friedkin's Sorcerer is a remake of Clouzot's Wages of Fear (1953), a masterful thriller about a group of broke truckers who go on a suicide mission to deliver highly unstable dynamite to a construction site deep in a South American forest. Friedkin has said in the most recent issue of Film Comment that he'd probably seen Clouzot's Diabolique upwards of 50 times, but he would never consider remaking it. "I love Clouzot's films," Friedkin beamed. "They're hard-edged and they're not sentimental. Diabolique is a very scary film. That nine minute sequence, without a word, is one of the most terrifying scenes I've ever seen."

But what makes Friedkin's films so unique is that sense of acidic humor stems from a perceptive view of the apathetic environments that breed his characters' obsessive and often inexplicable behavior. For example, in Rampage (1987), Friedkin follows the trial of a disturbed mass murderer shown to have Nazi paraphrenalia in his room, which is situated in the root cellar of a house ostensibly presided over by Twin Peaks star Grace Zabriskie. Both the defense seeking to prove that Zabriskie's son is legally insane and hence not in control of his actions, and the prosecuting attorneys who try to prove the defendant's guilt, produce evidence and witnesses that support their claims, leaving it up to the viewer to decide who is right and which factors matter most.

Similarly, the abrupt demise of the corrupt cop William Petersen (of CSI and Manhunter) plays in Friedkin's To Live and Die in LA is not that shocking, given the context of the drama preceding his death. Petersen plays a character so myopically focused on arresting the counterfeiter responsible for the death of his partner that he can't see anything else around him, not even the vibrant Los Angeles that Friedkin practically makes a central protagonist of his story. "A lot of people found [the death of Petersen's character] shocking at the time, just as they found the death of Janet Leigh shocking in Psycho," Friedkin protested. But at the same time, it's only immediately jarring. Thematically, that violent death is hardly gratuitous.

That same focus on the ways environment and setting shape a character's identity is true of Cruising, a film possibly even more notorious than The Exorcist. In it, Pacino plays an undercover cop who descends from a position of feeling above-it-all—though reluctant to fully embrace the almost god-like, condescending perspective that comes with being a cop—into a struggle to repress latent feelings of homosexuality when he goes in search of a killer in the Meatpacking District’s S&M Clubs. The self-loathing mania that defines Pacino's character has been unfairly called a sign that Friedkin considers homosexuality an abnormal disease, but his character's actions tell a different story when looked at in context. For example, a pair of cops on patrol deliberately paraphrase Taxi Driver's Travis Bickle when they say, "Some day, a rain's going to come to wash all the scum off the streets." Friedkin says he remembered "overhearing that dialogue from cops that were patrolling the Meatpacking District, as it was then. That district is now completely gentrified. But that's the way cops talk. That's the attitude: all these people on the street, they're scum!"

Friedkin went on to add that Randy Jurgenson, a NYC beat cop who worked with Friedkin on three films, including The French Connection, and was the main source of inspiration for Pacino's character in Cruising, didn't need to explicitly tell him how his undercover search affected his psyche. "[Randy] sort of resembled the victims, who were all dark-haired, with swarthy complexions and mustaches," Friedkin remarked. "And he was about the same height and the same build and he was assigned to attract the killer. And he told me his experiences and how the whole thing really screwed him up and bent his mind. And I remember never asking him further what he meant; I got it! "

The impotence and sociopathic feelings of powerlessness motivating characters like Pacino's character in Cruising and even McConaughey's in Killer Joe are crucial to what makes Friedkin's films so rich and also rather ugly. They have a pragmatic despair at their hearts because, to Friedkin, human behavior is gross and uncontrollable. When I asked him why he thought people were grasping at straws to qualify the "evil" motives behind the recent killings in Aurora, Colorado, Friedkin exclaimed, "Because there's no way to control human behavior, not even in China, where they basically have a dictatorship. And they have no ethnic differences whatsoever, no color differences. The reason why China has made such leaps forward economically is because they can control human behavior and punish it severely if it's at odds with the norm. In this country, we don't. We cannot control the norm. In this country, when you have democracy, there's nothing you can do to modify people's behavior."

With that in mind, Friedkin's films appropriately function as Rorshach ink blot tests for viewer reactions. For example, the ending of The Exorcist comes after an exhaustive battle for the soul of a young child. That battle is eventually, though hardly inevitably, won, after one priest forcibly defenestrates himself. The calm following this cure is uneasy, at best, making it very easy for viewers to see what they want in that calm after the storm. "The ending of The Exorcist is in the mind of the beholder," Friedkin told me. "What you take from the film is what you bring to it. If you think the world is a dark and evil place, that’s what you will get back. If you think there is hope for a power of the good that is constantly at war with the power of evil, you'll get that."

Simon Abrams is a New York-based freelance arts critic. His film reviews and features have been featured in The Village Voice, Time Out New York, Slant Magazine, The L Magazine, The New York Press and Time Out Chicago. He currently writes TV criticism for The Onion AV Club and is a contributing writer at the Comics Journal. His writings on film are collected at the blog, Extended Cut.

Old Man, Look at My Life: On NEIL YOUNG JOURNEYS

In 1971, Neil Young played two triumphant homecoming concerts at Toronto's Massey Hall. He was twenty-six years old, a formidable talent parlaying acclaimed stints with Buffalo Springfield, Crazy Horse and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young into an even more noteworthy solo career. Yet this young artist packed his Massey Hall set list with songs like “Old Man” and “Don't Let It Bring You Down,” obsessively touching on aging in lyrics like “Is it hard to make arrangements with yourself/when you're old enough to repay/but young enough to sell?” It's as if he knew he'd be standing there on stage, forty years later, in the Jonathan Demme concert documentary Neil Young Journeys, released this month, and he wanted the ghost of the young man he once was to welcome his future self.

Young didn't get around to listening to the original Massey recordings for twenty-seven years, and no wonder: he was a very busy man in the early seventies. That first concert was a stop not only on Young's solo tour (a US/Canada/UK commitment spanning four months in 1970-71, including stops at Carnegie Hall and an appearance on The Johnny Cash Show) but on a merry-go-round of activity that included a 1970 tour with Crazy Horse, the release of the “Ohio” 45 single (boosting sales of the Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young album Deja Vu), as well as the release of his own solo album After The Gold Rush. (Much of the delay about the Massey recording also stemmed from Young's decision to release new songs he performed that night as tracks on Harvest rather than on a live concert album.) By the time of the Massey concert, he was suffering from severe back problems (from a slipped disc incurred while fixing up his newly purchased ranch a ) that necessitated he sit, rather than stand, through his acoustic set.

However, Young doesn't seem pained or fatigued in Neil Young: Live At Massey Hall (2007), a “concert” film assembled by Young from dark and grainy footage shot in 1971 at another performance with the Massey Hall master tracks dubbed underneath, but there's a moment when he drops a guitar pick and laments, “Bending over is not so much fun.” Maybe the freshness of the material kept his spirits up, as much of the now-canonical songs on the set list (“Heart of Gold,” “A Man Needs A Maid,” “Old Man”) had not yet been released on the album Harvest, and their elemental renditions here are bright, pure, and steady. The film's a time capsule of a newly minted solo artist stretching his wings at the height of his youth and resilience. Only his remark about his back injury, first sign of the body's slow treachery, gives any indication of clouds gathering overhead.

Young's decades have been full of professional and creative successes, but good health has been a struggle, both for himself (the aforementioned back problems, epilepsy, an aneurysm) and his children (his two sons Zeke and Ben have cerebral palsy and his daughter Amber is also epileptic). As a film, Neil Young Journeys is not in peak condition, either. Demme's previous Young concert film Neil Young: Heart Of Gold (2006) is sleek and well-lit, and while the follow-up Neil Young Trunk Show (2009) is grittier, it's still considerably more polished-looking than Journeys, a documentary that looks as though it was shot in two weekends – one spent at the concert, and one spent with Young driving through his hometown of Omemee, Ontario, pointing out childhood landmarks. The grainy, shaky footage from both shoots crosses over from low-fi into amateurish. More perplexingly, during the concert, Demme places a camera just below the microphone, not at Young's mouth but at his stubbly, wattly neck, and lingers on those shots for unclear reasons, as if he wants the audience to have the experience of being pressed into Young's adam's apple.

But where the visuals are lacking, the music is strong. Young's guitar, as bright and pure as a castrato in the original Massey recording, has now gained a yowly patina of feedback and reverb, like a voice made smoky by hard living, and its muscular feedback fills every crack in the theater. The two concerts share only “Ohio” on the set list, but the difference between the acoustic and distorted versions lays bare Young's changes. In the 1971 concert, it's a protest song, a young man taking a slight personally. In 2012 it's a father railing against a world where children can die, a point Demme underscores by intercutting family photos of the deceased students.

This decrepitude is the undercurrent of Journeys. All things fall apart: the rip in the hat Young wears onstage, the childhood places that aren't there, the death of the earth and the way life snatches health out of our hands. (Maybe that's why Demme wants to shove Young's grizzled jowls in our faces, to remind us everything's sagging and going gray.) Songs like “Peaceful Valley” and “Love & War” mourn a world out of kilter, and “Walk With Me” is less an invitation than a plea. But closing “Hitchhiker” with a new coda where he reflexively repeats he's thankful “for the wife . . . for the wife,” Young shows all is not lost, that what remains is an old man still dizzy with gratitude for when life has been sweet. It's important to note that, as a young man hobbled by back problems, Young had to stay seated onstage at Massey Hall. Here, forty years older, he's standing.

Violet LeVoit is a video producer and editor, film critic, and media educator whose film writing has appeared in many publications in the US and UK. She is the author of the short story collection I Am Genghis Cum (Fungasm Press). She lives in Philadelphia.

Ten Uniquely Horribly Brilliantly Wonderful Music Movies

Just as there is no such thing as a bad anti-war film, there is no such thing as a truly bad musical. The impulse itself is noble and raises any enterprise up 11 notches.

The people making a musical film may not be of the caliber of Terrence Malick or Paul Thomas Anderson, but hell—they not only had a song in their hearts, they imagined entire worlds where people burst into song. What kind of mean-spirited douche wouldn’t give extra credit just for that?

Not me. I love me some “bad” musicals. I love to see that what people think goes with sounds. Or vice versa.

Enjoying these films is about readjusting criteria, realizing that po-faced seriousness and Big Drama are all tricks anyone can learn—which is why TV writing staffs are always full. But the music-based thing that happens in The Happiness of the Katakuris—what is that? You can’t learn it.

Ahem. In the following appraisals, I joke here and I kind of dis there, but I’m always in appreciative awe. I strongly believe that if Georges Méliès were alive and had a song in his heart, one of his films would be on this list.

Can’t Stop the Music (1980)

Steve Guttenberg's a totally straight boy who only wants to not have sex with his ex-super model roomie (Valerie Perrine) so he can put together a singing group (the Village People), so he can make disco records.

That Hollywood impresario Allan Carr thought straight America would buy that story, as well as scenes where men showing no interest in women danced with other men while singing about "The Milk Shake"—well, you gotta admire chutzpah.

As for the film, which clearly used up all the spandex, lurex, and Barbarella style “futuristic” plastic baubles that clubs of the period favored, quick dismissal is inappropriate. First, the songs are mostly catchy as hell, and positioned at the Hollywood and Vine where catchy and ludicrous French kiss.

Take a minute: 15 years from now, what do you think people are going to think about those skinny leg jeans and that impractical beard you maintain? And Fun, Jack White, and Skrillex? Yeah, sobering, isn’t it?

Flash Gordon (1980)

How much multi-track-mojo did the post “Bohemian Rhapsody” Queen own by the time Dino De Laurentiis decided on an un-upgraded version of the ‘30s Flash Gordon serial films?

So much that even when the film came out, people were contextualizing it within the band’s oeuvre.

Meanwhile, the only sound that outwits Queen’s magnificent Flash sountracksonic pomp is Max Von Sydow’s cackle as Emperor Ming the Merciless, who’s super evil and out to destroy the Earth unless football star “Flash” Gordon (Sam Jones) and journalist Dale (Melody Anderson) can stop them.

Flash doesn’t seem like a musical but it works like one. Through a color palette set to “Art Nouveau sunset,” we suffer through the enjoyably hambone story so we can get to the good parts: the bad green screen, matte, and model effects accompanied by those walls of overdubbed and orchestrated Brian May guitars and the many times overdubbed May, Freddie Mercury and Roger Taylor master choir melodically proclaiming "AH!," "OH!," and, of course, “FLASH!”

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1978)

As a “jukebox musical film,” Sgt Pepper’s never had to do anything but throw together as many stars as corporate music’s golden age could and trust the great unwashed would come. Or so said the cocaine frying the makers’ brains.

Which is the only way to explain The Bee Gees and a mute Peter Frampton as Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band looking for magic instruments. Which led to musical numbers by Aerosmith, Steve Martin, Alice Cooper, Earth, Wind & Fire, and Godzilla (kidding, but would you be surprised?).

What’s really on producer Robert Stigwood’s mind is Saturday Night Fever and how to duplicate its mad success. That the answer was a flat, five-camera TV comedy-style style spearheaded by a stogie-smoking George Burns in full Borscht Belt fettle . . . well, when people speak of America’s lost innocence, it’s the addlepated, guileless, ‘ludes-cancelling-out-blow, wanna-put-on-a-show-ness of Sgt. Pepper I think of.

The Apple (1980)

In the Eighties, Menahem Golan produced meat ‘n potatoes actioners starring Stallone, Norris, Van Damme, and Bronson like he was falling off a log. But before that, he sewed some insane oats with The Apple.

Before losing its mind entirely, colorfully, amazingly, The Apple tells us of Alphie (George Gilmour) and Bibi (Catherine Mary Stewart), two freakishly wholesome folk singers from Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan (!) competing in the1994 Worldvision Song Festival.

Alas! They are beaten by Mr. Boogalo (Vladek Sheybal) who then seduces them into the music industry’s lifestyle of elaborate, badly choreographed dance numbers because Boogalo is also . . . Satan! He is also so powerful that he compels all of America to wear Mr. Boogalo triangular stickers and engage in compulsory fitness workouts.

The Apple just gets more insane, including—I think—God and His videogame sound effects, because there is no ceiling on crazy here just a time limit on how long a movie can be and still get distributed.

Rock n' Roll Nightmare (1987)

God made the ‘80s so Jon Mikl Thor could becomes a bodybuilder, learn how to rock, and star as Triton, singer of a glam metal band that decamps to a skeezy house in Canada with some babes to work on their new record. But they’re soon infested by demons until Thor smashes. Everything you’re imagining this film will include—uproariously Poison-ous power ballads, over-permed hair, dubious latex demons—is here in abundance.

But the Direct-to-Video ethos hits a new apotheosis when a shirtless Triton battles some tiny flip-floppy eye demons and then, to the beat of hilariously literal hair metal (“We Accept the Challenge”) takes on the main demon, an immobile mannequin Jon Mikal has to be careful not to break.

Thor looks like a big male bodybuilder metalhead, but he’s a little boy and he wants to play with monsters. And so he does. It’s freaking adorable.

Spice World (1997)

So now that it’s long over, we can all exhale and admit that, man, did the UK blow in the 90s or what? I mean, okay, Napalm Death, Carcass, and Bolt Thrower, but Oasis? Blur? That poor man’s Muse, Radiohead?

Thank God for Spice Girls. I recall, vividly, that Spice Girls, the film, was what the recent Katy Perry film was trying to be—candy-colored ultra pop—but without Perry’s creepy porn-for-children lyrics and visuals.

Spice Girls personified goofball egalitarianism: all dancing terribly, all singing mediocrely, all embracing a power that was about not taking anything seriously, at a time when the UK boy kings of self importance—your Thom Yorkes and Richard Ashcrofts—could do nothing else.

Spice Girls was a poor girl’s A Hard Days Night, a bunch of skits and non-stop silliness. When I saw the model Spice Girls bus go over the model London Bridge, I nearly injured myself laughing, I do not know why. I love when that happens.

The Happiness of the Katakuris (2001)

I once interviewed Takashi Miike, the famed hyper-prolific Japanese creator of often disturbing films like Visitor Q and Gozu (both films featuring men crawling out of women’s vaginas).

Through an interpreter, I asked what was, like, up with that.

He chuckled, spoke, and the interpreter said, “Miike say he has trouble understanding women and through his films tries to maybe understand them better.”

The Happiness of the Katakuris lives in some completely mad limbo between his so-so Yakuza movies and exquisitely controlled art films like Box.

It’s a deeply spiritual, family-oriented zombie musical dealing with a failing guesthouse, a suicide, more death, some Claymation, a romantic daughter, her sweet parents and then everyone is SINGING, in a color scheme amped up to look like The Sound of Music.

Does Miike understand women better? Can’t say. But I’d swear he kind of loves them.

Across the Universe (2007)

Across the Universe is so epically dreadful in conception and hilariously, absurdly, offensively and, yeah, beautifully absurd in execution that it manages to overwhelm even director Julie Taymor’s Mount Kilimanjaro of self-regard.

There's no story, just people with Beatle song names like Jude (Jim Sturgess), Lucie (Evan Rachel Wood) and Prudence (T.V. Carpio), who go to Beatles song places to do Beatles song things, like a Vietnam unit carrying the Statue of Liberty while singing “She's So Heavy'' (seriously), or Bono singing "I am the Walrus," which I'd suspected for years.

There’s tons of whack-a-doodle imagery—five naughty nurse Salma Hayeks?—but surprise MVP Evan Rachel Wood is so devoted, and her tremulous alto is so sweet it even calms down her director, suggesting what would happen if she had even a microgram of aesthetic self-control. Download: “If I Fell.” See?

REPO! The Genetic Opera (2008)

REPO! is a movie that I’m sure pretty much aimed for a certain degree of “bad” but not so “bad,” it couldn’t be treasured. In short, an intended cult film.

So! Does this dystopian story of a company that supplies organ transplants and the “repo men” who rip them out if you default—does it work as intentional comedy, or camp or what?

Actually, the marketing sells the film itself short.

With Broadway star Sarah Brightman fantastic as a blind opera singer, Buffy’s Anthony Head delightfully evil, and Paris Hilton as a plastic surgery addict (!), as well as an impressive Hellraiser-as-cityscape look, I’d say that, in terms of sheer sensation assault, REPO! is a success.

The actual songs by Terrance Zdunich and Darren Smith also use a metal/industrial style to create something that actually works as opera. So partial bad news to director Darren Lynn Bousman: your bad film is simultaneously kind of good—and that’s REPO’s odd, sanguine charm.

Tron: Legacy (2010)

After about 40 minutes of Garrett Hedlund in a cathode-blue-lined black body suit on his video-cycle, zipping around a mainly-black videogame ‘verse, I totally spaced.

Even with occasional splotches of exploding color, and Jeff Bridges digitally shorn of 30 years of age (weird), it was like watching gloomy rave visuals. Even with Olivia Wilde in a fetish bob and body glove, I spaced out. Really—how long can you look at colored lights ping-ponging around a screen?

The answer came: The same way one would listen to Daft Punk’s fantastic score, suggestive of Vangelis’ Blade Runner work mixed with downtempo electronica.

As ambient music, or rather, ambient video. If only there were a way to put Tron on an eternal-loop, you could totally play it during cocktail parties, or after you’d smoked a few, or whatever. In short, as a movie, not so great. But as a digital lava lamp, I’d totally invest in Tron: Legacy.

Ian Grey has written, co-written or been a contributor to books on cinema, fine art, fashion, identity politics, music and tragedy. Magazines and newspapers that have his articles include Detroit Metro Times, gothic.net, Icon Magazine, International Musician and Recording World, Lacanian Ink, MusicFilmWeb, New York Post, The Perfect Sound, Salon, Smart Money Magazine, Teeth of the Divine, Venuszine, and Time Out New York.